Dr Kyle Herman

Post:	Research Fellow in Advanced Energy Studies (SPRU - Science Policy Research Unit)
Email:	K.Herman@sussex.ac.uk

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Biography

Dr. Kyle S. Herman is a researcher at the Energy and Policy Institute at the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) at the University of Sussex Business School in the United Kingdom. His research is broadly based in global political economy, with more narrow specializations in climate, environmental and clean technology innovation, private-sector climate governance, net-zero pledges and plans, and global energy infrastructure. 

He has held visiting positions the Fundazione Eni Enrico Mattei and the Grantham Institute on Climate and the Environment. He is also a start-up entrepreneur and continues to consult with the private sector on technological innovation, climate transitioning, and the “race to net-zero.” One of his start-ups was selected as a finalist for the World Economic Forum’s Braintrust, and he actively engages with other entrepreneurs working on critical climate change issues. He is the founder and host of Greta’s Generation, a podcast dedicated to showcasing the world’s leading academics, policy-makers, and business leaders working on critical global climate issues, with the aim to provide the younger generation with knowledge and ideas for a potential career or activism in climate change.

Before joining Sussex he played a lead role at UCL's Global Governance Institute, under the Horizon 2020 funded GLOBE project, investigating climate governance in the private sector, specifically how new actors were emerging to help firms transition to a net-zero economy—such as the Science-Based Targets Initiative (SBTi), the Taskforce on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD), and the CDP (Coen et al., 2020; Coen et al., 2022). Other ongoing research explores how climate and environmental policies induce innovation in emerging climate change mitigation technologies (CCMTs) (Herman & Xiang, 2019), the impact of global trade on such inducement effects (Herman & Xiang, 2022), the potential for machine-learning to better inform environmental policy and anticipatory climate governance (Herman & Shenk, 2021), and collaboration for technological innovation between Newly Industrializing Countries and G7 Economies (Herman, 2022).

Role

At the University of Sussex, he works under Dr. Benjamin Sovacool on two projects: IDRIC (Industrial Decarbonization Research & Innovation Centre) and GENIE (GeoEngineering & Negative Emissions pathways in Europe). 

Community and Business

Dr. Herman’s first foray into climate change policy and governance came in 2011, working with the International Network for Sustainable Energy (INFORSE), based in Denmark, where he had the fortune to work with global policy-makers in the lead up to the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015. He also worked with the International Finance Corporation and private consultants to expand the development of renewable energy in South America. These earlier practitioner experiences provided the background for research on country-level climate and environmental policies (Herman, 2013).